When I first encountered J I knew several programming languages including
APL. And, as always doing things backwards, I started by reading the
Dictionary. It was tough! It took a while, but I finally began to understand
J. But then what troubled me was that "I know how to do this in
APL/FORTRAN/whatever,
and I remember seeing it in the Dictionary, but I can't find it. It still
happens to this day.
What I needed, and still do at times, is a reference keyed by non-J
terminology to J. A section in help called "HowTo". This would be a list of
words and phrases used in other languages like FORTRAN, C, etc. and even
English which people use to describe doing something on a computer. For
example: The word "Select" would link to a section containing several places
in J help. Other words like "Index" and "Subscript" could link to the same
section. The section for these words would reference various ways that one
could perform the action in J and could look something like:
{ Index, Subscript Similar to subscripting in other programming languages
# Copy Pick items based on a mask
/. Key Group items based on a key
{. Take Take beginning items
}. Drop Drop beginning items
In this case, each primitive above would be a link into the Dictionary for
that primitive. This is not intended to be a complete description on how to
do those things, but simply make it easy to find the appropriate J facility.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
